Cuomo Digs At De Blasio’s Second Summer Vacation

Add another item to the long list of ways in which Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo differ: vacation style.

POLITICO reports that After de Blasio’s office announced Sunday evening that the mayor would be taking his second week-long vacation in as many months — with stops in Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, bringing to 25 the total number of days the mayor will have been traveling and away from City Hall in the last six weeks — Cuomo was asked, at an unrelated press conference on Long Island Monday, what he thought of the mayor’s seeming abundance of vacation.

“Yeah, look everybody determines how much vacation they need. I don’t comment on anyone’s vacation schedule. It’s personal, you do what you think is right,” Cuomo said.
“For me, I am not comfortable leaving the state. If I leave the state and something happens, I like to be hands on, I like to be there. I don’t care what it is. If it’s a problem with the MTA, god forbid, a train derailment, a hurricane, a flood, I like to be there. I think that’s my job. I got that ethic, frankly from my father, who was governor for 12 years. His point to me as a young fellow was, ‘to do the job you have to be there.’ You wanna be the governor of New York? Be in New York. I can count on one hand in 12 years how many days my father left the state,” Cuomo said. “And then it was only for state business. So I probably inherited that ethic, much to the chagrin of my kids, I can tell you that. But that’s what I’m comfortable with. But everybody has their own style, and today you could argue with modern communication it doesn’t really matter where you are, they can get you. But I’m a little old school, I like to be here, I like to be hands on, I like to be there in person.”